1. Field of Invention
This disclosure relates to compression and storage of state transition instructions of a state machine.
2. Description of Related Technology
Today's Internet is rife with security threats that take the form of viruses and denial-of-service attacks, for example. Furthermore, there is much unwanted incoming information sent in the form of spam and undesired outgoing information containing corporate secrets. These trends, and others, drive demand for more sophisticated processing at various points in the network, such as at server front ends, at wire speeds and near-wire speeds. These demands have given rise to anti-virus, intrusion detection and prevention, and content filtering technologies. At their core, these technologies depend on pattern matching. For example, anti-virus applications may look for fragments of executable code and Java and Visual Basic scripts that correspond uniquely to previously-captured viruses. Similarly, content filtering applications may look for a threshold number of words that match keywords on lists representative of the type of content (e.g., virus signature and/or SPAM) to be identified.